Tag: el generico

The ancient Greeks used a specific word–kairos– to mean roughly “the ability to choose the perfect moment to act.” They used it, for example, to describe the gift of knowing exactly when to loose an arrow in order to hit the target perfectly. Wrestling is a constant struggle to achieve kairos, because any wrestling promotion is basically an intricate ecosystem of interconnected parts: feuds and wrestlers and venues and dates. It’s like finding the right moment to…

Run-ins are the bane of anyone trying to look back and re-assemble a story in wrestling. You could, for example, watch every single match between Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn in the WWE and never come across the first time they interacted on Raw–because it happened at the end of a match between Kevin and Neville, where Sami comes out and interrupts a post-match beatdown: Lots of feuds and alliances are born in unrelated matches,…

So let’s say you’re an inexperienced wrestling fan who’s made an unwise and hasty vow to watch everything two indie wrestlers have ever done over the last 13 years (let’s say you’re me). This is kind of like suddenly being handed a huge bag of Lego blocks and told “Here it is, there’s a really cool thing here, but you have to do the work to put it together.” You stare at all the tiny…

Usually one wouldn’t describe a severed artery as a “lucky break” for anyone. But this is wrestling, so sure, why not. By mid-2004, the tireless work of IWS’s publicist, Michael Ryan, has gotten some IWS wrestlers spots in two East Coast promotions, Jersey All Pro and Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW). One of them, Sexxxy Eddy, slices his arm in the middle of a CZW hardcore match, hits an artery and ends up with a…

Once upon a time in Montreal… It’s October 2003, and Kevin Steen and El Generico are just nineteen years old. Kevin has just come out of three years of routinized wrestling school into truly impromptu wrestling; Generico has been trained by a guy who took his money to teach him how to take bumps on frozen grass in the park. Kevin’s been wrestling for IWS for a couple of months now, but only now is…

“Everyone is looking at us.” There are two thousand people settling into their seats in the Gifu gymnasium, nestled deep in the Japanese Alps. Only two of them are not Japanese. “Everyone is not looking at us,” Dan says firmly as we try to find our seats. It’s late 2015; this is only the fourth wrestling show we’ve ever attended, and all the others were WWE shows. But we’ve decided to try a New…

Once upon a time seems a good way to start this story. It’s a story almost too narratively perfect to be true, which includes forbidden wrestling, miraculous moonsaults, emotional breakdowns and epiphanies, and ambition renounced for art. It’s the beginning of one of the greatest friendships, and rivalries, and stories in wrestling. It may even be the beginning of two of the greatest friendships, and rivalries, and stories in wrestling. And as pieced together from two shoot interviews…

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"In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible." -Roland Barthes